A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN AND THE HIRSAU REFORM
IN GERMANY 1080–1180
Constant J. Mews
Hildegard of Bingen rarely displays any debts to existing movements of
religious renewal in Germany. At the beginning of Scivias, she describes
how she experienced a moment of illumination in the 43rd year of her
life, but gives no indication that the monastery where she had been raised
as a child was itself the product of any movement in religious reform.1
In reflections preserved by her biographer, she recalls simply that she
was offfered up to religious life by her parents in the 8th year of her life
(namely, 1105), and that she spoke frequently about visionary experiences
until her 15th year (1112), when she became fearful of what others might
say. She implies that she was born into an age of spiritual decline, when
Christian fervor had grown slack, and that her early life had lacked a clear
sense of direction and commitment.2 Yet we cannot understand the particular
direction of her life—both in its early phase at Disibodenberg, and
then after she started to assert her spiritual identity in 1141—without reference
to a movement of religious renewal that had been evolving within
German monasticism since the 11th century, in particular that associated
with the abbey of Hirsau.
Because Hildegard was technically Benedictine in her observance (not
a term she would have known), it is often assumed that she belonged
to an “unreformed” monasticism, more traditional in character than that
of the Cistercian Order, which based itself around strict observance of
the Rule of Benedict. This assumption—that 12th-century monasticism
can itself be divided into two primary groupings, one traditional and
Benedictine, the other innovative and Cistercian—is itself shaped by the
polemical literature generated by the Cistercian reform, in particular by
its preeminent publicist, Bernard of Clairvaux. His Apologia for the Cistercian
way of life, addressed to William of St Thierry in the mid-1120s, has
had great influence in creating the impression that prior to the establishment
of Cîteaux and the Cistercian way of life in 1098, monasticism—at
1 Scivias, “Protestifijicatio,” p. 3.
2 V. Hild., 2.2, p. 23.